I’ve got a major problem here (or several) and am in hopes of the wonderful wizards of this forum to point me in the right direction.

I’ve been fighting with a nasty hosting bug for the last 18 hours or so. I finally got my sites back up, but my zen-cart stores are NOT working.

I don’t believe it’s a zen-cart specific problem at this point - I think it’s a mySQL problem. I believe the database is corrupted for each store.

Here’s what I just sent to my hosting company - after restoring backups from 2 days ago (store and db), things are still broken, so they suggested going backwards on the php version) :

Quote:
I can’t believe that the old PHP would solve the problem. Like I said - the sites were working fine on the 23rd at 5 pm - that’s the last order I received.
At about 6:30 pm is when we messed up our domain due to the bug in YOUR panel. (not pointing fingers - but this one really was NOT my fault. )
I’ve been trying to fix this - and getting calls from all over the country about the *** site being down.
I don’t believe it’s a direct zen cart problem, because 2 of the broken stores are earlier versions of zencart. the latest 2 are newer versions.
All the stores are exhibiting the same problem.
I don’t think it’s the XSS vulnerability problem - because only one of the sites uses open text fields.

But my shopping cart is not visible, no matter what I put into it in either store, and my admin console within zencart is corrupting my customer/order records.

I’m stumped - the only common denominator I can come up with are the data bases.

Sandy

To elaborate more on the problem:

The initial event that caused all the problems went like this:
I had a sample, disabled store that was continuously reloading. So, of course, I thought something might have been forwarded in error. But rather than fix it, I thought I’d just point it to my mirror test store. Unfortunately it was on the same domain. So I got an error message from my hosting company (as I should have done). BUT - before getting the error message, their control panel had wiped ALL my configuration data for that domain - which hosts 4 live and 4 under development zen cart stores. We finally got the domain viewable, and have the domain forwarding working, but all the stores are broken.

Detailed description:
It doesn’t matter what items you try to put into your shopping cart. Doesn’t matter if you’re logged in or not. Screen shows “your shopping cart is empty” message, there’s no shopping cart button to view the cart, NOTHING.
I logged into one of my test accounts, where i had left something in the cart a couple of weeks ago. That was still there. But when I removed it, and attempted to put something else into the cart, the shopping cart is empty message came back, and the “my shopping cart” button/link went away.

that’s the bad news.

The HORRIBLE news is as follows:
When in the admin console - when I try to update an order status - say from pending to processing - the status goes away, red X’s appear instead of green check marks, and I can no longer access that order except by entering the number explicitly.

No - wait - there’s more.
I decided that before I took desperate measures and blew the store away, I’d capture all my attributes for each item. And there’s a ton. I went to the attributes controller, selected my category, and printed out the attributes of the first item. I then went and selected the second item IN THE SAME category, and it kept bumping me back to the first sort order category. I couldn’t see the attributes of the second item in the category.

The response

If you have cPanel - You can enter the mysql area and select check and/or repair the DB to see if it is something simple???

thanks.
I’m not a mySQL expert by any means. Nor do I understand all the inner workings of zencart. My manual is on the way, but in the meantime…

Are you able to give me some hints about what to look for? I’m afraid that stuff is getting really balled up, and i’ll just make it worse.

I guess what I should ask is this:
Can someone point me to somewhere where I can see what my db structure and setup should look like, so I have something to compare to?

Also - I just looked (myphpAdmin - database -> Operation and got the following error message.
Quote:
Error
The additional features for working with linked tables have been deactivated. To find out why click here.

Ideas???

phpmyadmin is deeper than I was suggesting for repair…

In cPanel > mysql > there is a list of the DB’s created and for each there is a selection to delete - check - repair
Select “check” or select “repair” at this screen

In phpmyadmin do be cautious as one can ball things up here. A 1.3.7 install with no other mods that add tables should have 93 tables

Your error message looks to be hosting related as a deactivation of this feature in phpmyadmin - ask them if this is the case - also what version of mysql and version of phpmyadmin?

Any help or insight would be appreciated. This is my livelihood, and it’s killing me to have the sites down.

Well, after almost 4 days of fighting with this, and with everyone pointing fingers at everyone else, this problem has been narrowed down to a dreamhost problem.
When my hosting settings got messed up, my data base access settings (deep somewhere in the db, or in the pathway to the db) got messed up.
My businesses have been down this entire week, and now because of the time lost, and the fact that it will take DH at least 24 more hours to answer my last query, and the fact that I MUST get this site up before the weekend, I guess I have to move my hosting.
Sigh.

What settings are you talking about and how did they get "messed up? I’ve read, and re-read, your original post several times trying to figure out what you were trying to say, and what problem you were having, but I still have no clue what about your situation, other than that “something doesn’t work”.

Your comment in the earlier post, “At about 6:30 pm is when we messed up our domain due to the bug in YOUR panel. (not pointing fingers - but this one really was NOT my fault. )” - doesn’t give much of a clue. I’m the first to admit that parts of the panel can seem less than intuitive on occasion, but if there is a bug (as opposed to something you just didn’t understand, and therefore subsequently “borked”), the least you could do if you hope to get any help with it is to share what happened.

This sounds for all the world like a “PBCAK” problem to me, since you can’t even seem to articulate what the problem is or how it manifests itself.

Of course, if you want to focus less on whose fault “it” was, and explain what happened, what you have done, and what problem you are now having, someone here may be able to help. Other than that, the best I can do is to wish you “good luck” with your support ticket and/or your hosting move.